He kept his chin up
no matter what, weathering
all weather.from “Crushed” by Dave Bonta

When I am working, sometimes
there’s tension and frustration,
sometimes supervisors or
customers will shout at the shirt,
call its name out with a string
of expletives.

Inside the shirt, I am safely
anonymous, and protected.
No one ever actually gets
to shout at me.

***

When I am working, sometimes
it’s tedious and repetitive,
nothing to hold my interest, so
I pretend I am a spy working
undercover.

Within my cover identity,
I then become attentive to every
thing and every one around me,
and as I occupy my mind
with this, the mindless work
gets done.

***

When I am working, sometimes
it is challenging, feels perhaps
a bit beyond me, overwhelming,
and I feel uncertain, hesitant.

But then I remember that I am
a superhero, and already in
my costume, my hero-name
clearly visible right there
on my lapel, and then I can
tap right in to the superpower
secrets and proceed
with confidence.

***

Make no mistake: I DO go
to the laundromat, and wash
my boxers, socks, and jeans.

Shirt-selections from St. Vincent’s
are more about some other things
(and a bit about not ironing).

It arrives, as it always does eventually,
that awkward moment in casual
conversation with someone newly
met, that point at which they’ve told
you a bit about themselves, and since
you yourself have not been saying
much, have not volunteered
to introduce yourself more fully,
that awkward moment when the other
party really cannot carry the conversation
on alone, and begins to ask a few
casual questions about you, and then
you have to choose to either ante
up or leave the table…

…but this time, I am given a reprieve
of sorts, by a rip in the fabric
of the universe. Or more
specifically, a rip in the sleeve
of a dress-white shirt that looks quite
new. A young man stands holding up
the offending sleeve. For a moment he
is speechless, then he says: I am
the best man. The wedding is this evening.
I can’t afford another shirt, I don’t
get paid till Thursday. I don’t…

He stops, and before he finds more
words to wrap around the panic-wound,
both the barkeep and myself
are reaching. The barkeep is extracting
money from the till…but I am quicker
on the draw, stand up and drag the bar
stool back a little further from
the bar, hold up a needle
and a spool of thread, and I say:
Give it.

He starts to speak again, and I say:
Go away. The gentleman will page you
when your shirt is ready, and there’s plenty
of time to get it done if you
don’t distract me.

He disappears. The bar disappears, as
does my coffee, and the sounds
of jukebox music, conversation,
all such inputs fade away as
I turn myself inward in preparation
for the magic-making. Needle threaded,
thread pulled smooth, a sleeve
turned inside out. This is inverted
voodoo, this piercing of the broadcloth,
not for harming but for healing.

Invisible stitches, each a tiny
planting hiding along the seam, each one
carrying a wish, a blessing.
Drawing the stitches firmly here,
but not so tightly that they pucker, I
am sowing a white-thread furrow
no one else can see: here I pierce
the soil and plant a seed

— (may this young man
be reassured) and another
–(may he always feel standing up
for a friend is a thing of importance)
— (may he always be in reverent
awe of weddings, and all they represent)
— (may the bride and groom
be likewise)
— (and remain so, in awe of their own
marriage, and all it represents)
— (and if there come children,
may they teach them kindness)
— (for other
people)
— (for all living
beings)
— (may they raise them
to respect all that breathes like we do)
— (and all
that breathes invisibly)
— (may these
stitches carry blessings)
— (may these
stitches carry hope)
— (may these
stitches hold)

At the beginning of spring
gardening the snakes, indigenous
and invasive, the harmless
and the poisonous, they all emerge,
and in that half-hour before dinner
that’s reserved for washing up,
I join them, five-foot-long

python with my upper
body draped protectively
across the top of the open
washer drum. I hiss insistently
at my beloved resident hobbit
as he’s stripping off his garden-
muddy clothing: what has it got
in its pocketses?

We do this every evening, it’s
routine. And then he turns his pockets
out to check, and occasionally
I’m actually justified in asking.

This dark orange fungal mass
that he extracts looks decidedly
suspicious, but he explains
excitedly that that’s the magic
of it: some other mushroom,lactarius or russula, inedible
on its own, gets invaded by this
other hypocreaceae fungus which
somehow eats up all the poison,
transforms the mushroom that might
have made you ill or killed you

into food. This parasitic hypocreaceae
fungus sort of cooks it, like it’s
boiling a lobster, and when it’s
orange-red all over, then you
know it’s safe to eat.

Ah. Okay, I did not know this,
and am feeling hungry, but more
so for the dinner that’s waiting on
the table than for a spongy orange
parasitic mass. Here, I’ll wrap
it in a napkin and put it on
your desk. We can continue
identification of weird things
from the garden after dinner.

And (to myself in silence as
I swaddle up the thing) I think:
so glad this bit of strangeness
didn’t wind up in the washing.

The 80-pound puppy’s been
following me from room
to room
licking the outer
seam of my jeans
just above the knee.
As the means of his investigation
slowly soaks in against
my thigh, I stop
to give him my attention
and thoughtfully consider
what exactly
he is doing.

He is not yet a full year
old, and doesn’t have a grasp
of personal space
or boundaries. (As far as
he’s concerned, we’d all do better
in this world if we stayed
glued together
at the hip.) And so, with no
inhibitions, he’s been reading
my diary, the moments
of my personal history
left out in the open
when I rinsed my hands too
briefly in the sink, then
wiped them on my jeans.

He’s reading cumin
and cilantro, pepper-bean-tomato-
and-zucchini tacos. He’s
been reading and, as young
readers do, letting what he’s reading
transport him
into an imaginary place
where dogs not only are
permitted in the kitchen, but
get to share in meals
prepared there, maybe even
their own chairs right
at the table.

Or maybe not. Perhaps
something gets lost in translation.
But, to facilitate moving
more easily through the day
I go ahead and wash
my hands again and change.

And now it’s time to tend
to laundry, and as I take each
item out of the hamper, turn
the pockets, I begin to look
at each more closely. (The puppy’s
right beside me, delighted
to be teaching this old
dog new tricks.) Together,
we examine closely a plaid shirt
my husband wore while working
on the neighbor’s barbed wire
fencing. It’s black-and-red-
and-gray plaid flannel,

not one to show much
surface evidence, but puppy
sniffs insistently at the cuff,
and so I stop and sit
down on the floor
to look more closely.

The family that reads together…
Never mind. What is this darker
stain that wasn’t there before?
It appears in splotches, something
that was wet and spread, then
dried. And here, a tear
along the sleeve I hadn’t seen.
Perhaps dried blood? The mister
has not said anything to me
about getting any injuries. We turn
the page, set that one into
the washer and extract the next:
an olive green bandana, one of those
he takes with him as handkerchiefs.

This has a dark patch on it
and tight creases, like a tie-dye
project, and puppy tastes
it briefly and whines a tiny
bit and turns his head away.
This one’s still a bit damp from
something and I sniff it, catch
the briefest whiff: steel? spinach?
iron? blood. Barbed-wire fencing.
A snag, a bleeding gash,
a staunching. A wound hidden,
left unmentioned. So here’s me:

sitting on the washroom floor,
also reading someone’s diary,
noticing things I’d never really
noticed about laundry. My old
jacket smells like
incense and french fries now.

trust us. we are mechanics
of the first degreefrom “our name is mike” by j.lewis

The kitchen sink: eight cubic
feet, two each way by two feet
deep, with two outdoor spigots
set into its steel back-wall
well above the highest water
level possible. Steel splash-
guard protecting the wall
on the right side, a bright

overhanging sconce light,
and the counter on the left
side rolls away, leaving plenty
of room for rag-towels
to protect the floor. Kitchen
sink that, like most of us,
has to serve more than one
purpose to earn the floor-space
it takes up. Double-duty.

Heavy duty. Because that
machine whose job it is
to do the washing comes with
permanent disclaimers, warning
labels that proclaim:

No washer can completely
remove oil. Do not dry anything
that has ever had any type
of oil on it. Le non-respect
de ces instructions peut causer
la muerte, un explosion, o
incendio.

Check. I have a thought, dismiss
it with a slight regret. Recite
one hundred times: I will not
write to Maytag asking what they
mean, “do not dry anything….”

I am envisioning asking if
a thing has been so unlucky as
to have actually had oil on it,
how is one to keep it from
eventually drying out all by
itself? And when it does, are
they seriously warning me

that it will be like in
secondary school, in chemistry,
when we thought it would be
interesting to extract
the phosphorus from its safe-place
underwater in a jar and leave
it on the steel counter?
(That was interesting indeed.)

I am envisioning an attic
filled with two-gallon
pickle jars, greasy shirts
and jeans, all safely soaking
to keep them from exploding,
an occasional embroidered
name patch pressed sad and wet
against the inside of the glass.

Wisdom from some desert father
offered up by Thomas Merton:It is not because evil thoughts
come to us that we are condemned,
but only because we make use
of the evil thoughts. I complete
my hundred recitations of this
reassurance while I gather up
all the dangerously greasy

laundry. Gasoline and avgas,
solvent, tractor fluid, diesel…
and for balance, one pale green
fine linen dishtowel that got too
friendly with manual spray pump
used for squirting olive oil. It all
goes in the waiting sink.

This isn’t the kind of sink that’s
lined up on a window with a view.
This is a sink that gets right
down to business, and when
the hot spigot runs for just
six seconds, the steam would
make a window useless anyway.

I begin the layering:
the jeans and shirts, the worst
of the grease spots pointed
up. Then I tear off the card-
board top of a small box
of cornstarch and distribute
the fine powder fairly evenly,
making sure to not miss any
places thick with grease.

Then I pour in two litres
of soda (don’t believe anyone
who tells you it has to be
brand Coca-Cola, any cheap
generic carbonated containing
citric acid does just fine).
Then a cup of hand-wash
dishsoap. Then hot water.

Final layer is the rack
from an old Weber to hold
the clothes beneath
the surface of the steaming
murky stew. Turn on the vent
fan. DO NOT forget this.
Walk away. Come back
two hours later when it no
longer looks so angry, use
tongs to lift the grill
and pull the plug. Rinse.
Rinse. Rinse. Rinse. Rinse.

Oh what charming ruins
the inhabitants must be—
snaggletoothed and ravagedfrom “Provincial” by Dave Bonta

A bloodied sock, a nail-hole punched
through the sole of it. Mister
Cottonwood, please leave it here
with me. While you are away dancing
two days earlier than your doctor
recommends upon that foot you injured

sweeping up after the job at Mrs.
Blattner’s, I’d like to take that
sock and throw it, with its mate
(still whole but worn thin at heel
and toe), into the laundry. It is
a myth that there are elves that

live invisibly behind the scenes
in every laundry room. They’ve never
been in mine. (Perhaps they do exist
in other people’s dryers, that is not
for me to say…I can only speak
to the error of saying “every”.)

But here in this laundry room, there
are several piles of socks:

socks that are half of a pair, where
they and their partners were separated
in the hamper, and went through the wash
in different loads (they are waiting)

socks that are widowed, their partners
worn through, no longer strong enough
to serve as barrier between tender
foot-soles and tough footwear (they are
waiting too, to be matched to another
like them, similar in style and purpose,
waiting to be re-paired)

socks that have fulfilled the purpose
of their life as socks and can serve
no further in that role (they are
not to be discarded, they are waiting
for some purpose they may serve).
See, Mister Cottonwood? Your puncture
will be washed, then will reside here.

A makeshift glove to cover the hand
that wipes fresh creek-mud off
the puppy’s feet? A soft lint-free cloth
for applying hoof-care liniment
to the pastured horse? A clean layer
between the bag of frozen peas-and-
carrots and the skin to prevent frost-
biting when an inconvenient twist

of the wrist has happened that needs
some short-term icing? A gathering
of several members of this sock-pile
community to be entrusted, one atop
the other, to protect the outdoor
spigots in the hardest part of winter?
A mini-mop for the kitchen floor when
the salsa’s boiling becomes exuberant?

Reincarnation happens here, Mister
Cottonwood. Do not discard any
candidates. All may be re-purposed.